Minutes from Friday, October 15th 1999

Minutes for meeting of the ICU Linux User Group on Friday, May 21st 1999

The meeting was held at 1pm in Southside upper lounge.

Members present

• Richard Baker
• Henry Tang
• Matthijs van Leeuwen
• Thomas Sippel-Dau
• Richard (a new member)
• Zeshan (our new treasurer) [NOTE: originally misspelled as 'Zishan']

Minutes of previous meeting

The previous meeting was in the last academic year, Ed Avis forgot to get us to agree them.

Matters arising

Membership fee: Henry went to the RCC meeting and established that if we don't have a budget, we don't need a membership fee. Our only spending is publicity, which is funded by the Union anyway. Richard has run a club before and so is a useful ally in our battles with the Union :-).

Issues

New treasurer

Two new members at this meeting - Zeshan is our new treasurer [Marc Broster has left]. We still have thirty pounds left over from last year, which Zeshan will work out how to collect. Then we must decide how to spend it - we could buy Linux CDs, or we could buy blank CDs and burn them ourselves. The Union don't like it if we make profits from selling CDs - maybe we could sell them at cost.

Our first event

Organization

We need to organize our first major event for this year. It will be similar in structure to last year's 'big event', with presentations and stands in a big room. Do we want DoCSoc's help in booking a room etc? We don't dislike them, but last year we ended up booking a room ourselves.

Will people want to come to this event? On the one hand, last year's Linux Symposium was a great success, but that could work against us as people may think they have 'seen it all'. Matthijs thought we would get many more people than last year, but Ed was much more pessimistic. The number of people affects which room we should use; last year's room [308 Huxley] was overfull with 200+ people, and some couldn't get in. But OTOH, we don't want to end up with a few people in the middle of a huge empty space. The Great Hall would be nice, and we could have stands down the side with people in the middle, but it costs money to book.

Date

Definitely not this month. Probably this term, although that doesn't give us very long. Probably on a Wednesday. Early December sometime?

Should we have mini-seminars before the main event? We don't want to have to wait all that time before doing something. OTOH, six weeks until December is not much time to plan one event, let alone mini-events as well. We would like the first event to be the biggest, and the mini-seminars to follow once we have built up an audience.

Talks

What talks or presentations should we have? Possibilities mentioned were:

• What kind of Linux? Last year we focussed on just one distribution, Red Hat. Maybe we could explain the different distributions that are available. OTOH, most people attending will want a fairly standard desktop system, so it could be making things too complex. There are many distributions (eg Slackware, DemoLinux) which will install on a DOS partition using UMSDOS, so there is no need to repartition. Also, some (SuSE, Slackware) can run from a live filesystem on CD.
• How to install a dual-boot machine with Win98. Last year we took the easy option and installed a machine from scratch. We could talk about repartitioning with FIPS, but we would have to warn about backups and so on.
• Matthijs suggested 'scientific applications on Linux'. He, or somebody else, could talk about applications such as Maple. (We can license this gratis for demonstration purposes.) It would need to have a different focus to last year's talk about number crunching. Another aspect of 'scientific applications' is control of external systems from Linux.
• A talk about LaTeX.
• Demonstrations of games on Linux, now that more are starting to become available. But we would have to actually buy the games in the first place.
• A talk for PHBs, about how wonderful Linux is. We could present case studies of where Linux has been successfully used in university administration. Ideally, managers from other universities could come and give a talk.
• A debate on the merits or disadvantages of Linux. Perhaps we could invite Microsoft.
• Demonstrate Windows apps on Linux using Wine or VMWare. It might be dishonest to demonstrate VMWare since it costs lots of money even for students.
• Web development using Linux. This is a very broad area and we would have to cover only one or two aspects. We must also avoid being too technical. We could talk about using the GIMP, PHP, and MySQL, among others.
• Talks on 'how it works' - as an overview such as 'how the system boots', or focussing on a particular component such as the kernel. But again, we don't want to get too technical. There is also the problem of finding somebody who is qualified to talk about such things.
• Demonstrate Linux's remote display capabilities using X or VNC.
• A talk on security would be useful. It would be fun to present it as an 'inverse security' talk, demonstrating how to crack a Linux box, or even having a 'live crack' in the same vein as a 'live install'. But that would never be allowed, unfortunately.
• Could we recommend books for people new to Linux? Would bookshops stock enough copies?
• Of course, we should encourage people to join the LUG.
• Sunny Chan, who talked about Linux Applications last year, sent his apologies that he won't be able to help us this time. [NOTE: this was a misunderstanding. He will indeed be able to help.]

Exhibitors

We would also like exhibitors. Should we charge them money? We wouldn't charge people who were coming to give a talk, since they are helping us out. But what about people who come to sell stuff - should they have to pay? We want to get the best deal for the college members attending, not exploit them. But we might need money to book a room. In practice, it is much easier not to make a profit and not to get money involved - the Union or College might get in the way otherwise. Maybe each commercial exhibitor could donate a prize for a draw.

Possible vendors we might invite:

• John 'Mr Linux Emporium' Winters
• Linux vendors like SuSE and Red Hat
• Waterstone's bookshop, as last year - but their Linux titles aren't always up to date.
• Josette Garcia from O'Reilly might come along.

Mailing list

Maybe we could have a newsgroup gatewayed to / from the mailing list, to avoid saturating people's mailboxes. But for the time being, this isn't a priority.